The Manicou Report

• I am not abandoning my blog, I promise. And not only am I not abandoning it, I just renewed my domain name for 2 years (and with only a day to spare too). However, without question, I have been a very bad blogger recently. I haven’t been posting regularly and when I did post, I never responded to my backchat. I’ve even been very bad about answering my e-mails. The reason (and not an excuse) is that I have been tremendously busy and I will continue to be very busy over the next two weeks or so. So I apologise without reserve for my behavior over the past weeks and for the upcoming weeks. I will do my best to be a better blogger in the next two weeks or so.

• Yesterday I noticed that my hits were spiking yet again, even though they had been on the decline for about a week along with the interest in the Akon/Danah Alleyne story. Of course it made me wonder why the sudden interest again, what was it that I missed. So I checked my stats only to realize that it was the poor Trinis abroad who apparently missed the memo and got up Tuesday morning wondering why there was no Miss Trinidad and Tobago in the 2007 Miss Universe Competition. Poor souls. I tried to warn you all, but unfortunately my reach is limited.

  In any case, the organizers have promised us that we will have a representative for next year’s competition so we won’t be disappointed again. I believe they have already chosen a representative although I can’t now remember her name.

• I’ve been getting a lot of nasty, racist messages left on my blog and I am probably not the only one. Usually I just delete the offending message from my post and not make a big deal about it. The last message was left in my chat box that I usually keep in my left sidebar. I decided to take down the message box as it was the easiest thing to do at the time and plus I thought that in the free version of the CBox it was impossible to remove unwanted messages. After accessing my account through the website, I found that it was possible. I’ve since remove the message and I’ll replace the Cbox when next I see my template. From now on, please help me to ignore the troll. Don’t fight with it, don’t feed it and not lend it any creditability. If you see it before I do, I’ll appreciate it if you can let me know.
• Happy Indian Arrival Day to all Trinis far and near. My sympathies to those of you who still have to attend school and work even though you know that your brethren back home are attending various beach and river limes. For me it looks like a very curry-less day from here. I need to plan for these days better. I should have at least tried a recipe from the Indian cookbook my sister bought me a few months ago. I think I’m going to plan from now to make myself some groundnut soup for Emancipation day.
• It’s a shame that you can miss so many good stories when you take a vacation from blogging. Ive’s managed to miss about both Manning’s prophetess and Camille Robinson-Regis’s “max it out” New York credit card adventure where madam minister managed to use a government-issued credit card to purchase weave. What plunged the whole issue into even more stupidity was her weak apology that she “misunderstood” the terms of the contract which contained rule #7 where it said the card was “not for personal use”. Goodness gracious - never a dull moment.

Anyway Trinis, have a good day and I’ll get back to you hopefully before the week is out.